Sermon Tone Analysis

Here we are at our final night of YC Week 2022 and last night we ended with the question: To whom shall we go and tonight we begin with the question, well what do I do now?

Even though Peter was the one that asked us the first question, we will turn to him for the answer to the second question so if you have a Bible, go ahead and turn to 1 Peter 2:9-12 and tonight will probably feel more like the YC that we are used to.

We won’t try to spend an hour dissecting various aspects of the identity crisis but we will see how Christians are to respond with the identity that they have in Christ.

In these verses that we are about to go through, we are going to see 3 things: Who the people of God are, who the people of God used to be, and how we are to live our lives as the people of God.

Let’s go ahead and read 1 Peter 2:9-12

Now some of this may sound familiar to what we have talked about over the last 4 nights or to what we went through when we went through 1 Peter almost a year and a half ago but that’s ok.

Nothing wrong with repitition when it comes to the Bible but I am going to try and not repeat anything that I have already said this week or in those past lessons.

Let’s start by talking about who we are as the people of God.

Who Are the People of God? (Verse 9)

So who are we as the People of God?

What is the Church?

What are Christians?

Peter gives that answer in verse 9 when he says to believers, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

Really right here in this one verse we could find the answer to all three of our questions but we will just use it to answer who we are as God’s people.

Peter uses a series of four descriptive phrases, and in these phrases we learn who we are but we also learn a lot about the God we serve.

The first of these phrases is that we are a chosen race.

For a Christian and the Church to be referred to as a chosen race means that they have been set apart by God from the rest of the world.

Just as God set apart the nation of Israel, so has He set apart the Church.

Peter was writing to an audience that was no stranger to the Old Testament so they likely saw the connection that Peter was making to Deuteronomy 10:15 “Yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day.”

To be a chosen race by God means that we are loved by God but we are not loved because of any goodness inside of us.

God does not choose us based off of future information that He has about us, though He certainly does know future information about us.

God chooses us because He is rich in mercy and love.

In Deuteronomy 7:6-8 we read “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.

The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”

The reason that God chose the nation of Israel was not because of anything inherently special about them but because He chose them and loved them based on His own will.

Why would God save this people?

Why would God save the Church?

And the answer is because He promised that He would!

To borrow a phrase from Matthew Henry, God is never indebted to His creation but He has chosen to allow Himself to be indepted to His promise.

Why did God choose to save the People of Israel or the Church?

Because He chose to.

Next Peter describes us as a royal priesthood and this is what Martin Luther referred to as the priesthood of all believers.

To be called a royal priesthood again points us back to Christ.

People don’t just choose to become priests.

In Exodus, God chose Aaron, his sons, and the tribe of Levi to be the priests.

In order for one to be a priest of the Lord, God must first choose him as a priest.

A priest was chosen by God to a task that God had ordained for that person to do.

No priest ever applied for the job.

Priests were chosen by God to do the work of God and that work largely involved interceding on behalf of the people.

We as the royal priesthood are called to not just reach the lost with the Gospel, we are called to minister to the saints.

We are to be active participants in the work of God.

The Church is never in a position to sit back and watch the world burn.

We are to be at the front lines, we’re to throw ourselves down before the eyes of the world and God and plead people to come to faith in Christ.

As priests, we are to be heralds of the Word of God.

Centuries ago, heralds would come into the chamber of the king, be given a message, and these men were expected to give the message to the people exactly as the king said.

They would go to where they were sent, they wouldn’t change a word, they wouldn’t add any extra thoughts, they simply spoke out what the king had commanded for them to say.

The king even sent extra people to make sure that the herald said the exact words that he said to spoke and as soon as he had finished the message, he reported back to the king.

You have been created to be a herald for Jesus Christ.

You don’t make the message, you don’t add to the message, you simply live out and speak forth that which your King has given you.

I love what David Walls writes about being a royal priesthood.

He writes, “A royal priesthood reminds us as believers that as priests we serve royalty.

We have not landed a maid-service position.

We are part of God’s “forever kingdom.”

Next Peter says that we are a holy nation.

Wayne Grudem says of this, “Just as believers are a new spiritual race and a new spiritual priesthood, so they are a new spiritual nation which is based now neither on ethnic identity nor geographical boundaries but rather on allegiance to their heavenly King, Jesus Christ, who is truly King of kings and Lord of lords.”

To be a holy nation means that we are to be a people that are set apart.

We are saved so that we may pursue righteousness.

We as Christians are not to stay the same.

We are saved so that we would be holy as our Heavenly Father is holy.

Charles Spurgeon said that the token of our nationality is that we are holy unto the Lord and this causes us to be marked off from the rest of mankind.

To be sanctified or to be holy means that all that we do, say, and think is marked by Christ.

Every single Christian is called to pursue holiness and we continue to pursue it because none of us will ever perfect it.

Our sanctification is never full to the brim.

Our sanctification is ongoing, it’s progressive, and this sanctification highlights how we have been called out by Christ so that we may reflect Christ.

Mark Dever said, “This means that we live our lives in allegiance to him.

We live in reverent fear of him.

We take our coordinates from him.

We take our bearings from him.

He is the audience we play to.

We do not take our directions from a pollster but from our Heavenly Polestar.

We are not simply trying to be popular with those around us, we look beyond our circumstances to the One who created us by his word and set us apart as his people.”

Finally, Peter describes us as a people for His own possession.

We belong heart, body, and soul to our Heavenly Father.

We don’t belong to any other.

Sin is no longer our friend and master.

We have been lovingly purchased by the Lord Jesus Christ.

That which we are now is different from that which we once were.

We are a people that are chosen and precious in the eyes of our God and because we belong to Him, we are to live differently from the rest of the world.

We see in all of these phrases that the People of God are different, they are set apart totally, from the rest of the world.

These four distinct phrases show that the people of God are totally indebted to God.

John Calvin wrote, “God has chosen us, when He could find nothing in us but evil and vileness; He makes us His peculiar possession from being worthless dregs; He confers the honor of priesthood on the profane; He brings the vassals of Satan, of sin, and of death, to royal liberty.”

With all that in mind, who did the people of God use to be?

For that answer we look at verse 10.

Who Did the People of God Used to Be? (Verse 10)

1 Peter 2:10 says, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

We won’t spend too much time on this because this is really what we talked about last night as we looked at Ephesians 2:1-3.

Before we were saved by Christ we were not God’s people, we rejected His grace and His mercy and chose to follow Satan over our Savior.

Before we came to Christ we were lovers of darkness.

We rejected the light because we would rather hold onto the dark and vile.

While we were still in our sins, we preferred mud to chocolate cake.

We would choose puddles over the ocean.

What is amazing to me is that people would rather choose nothing over everything.

By coming to Christ, you will possess everything that you truly need in life to be happy.

Not necessarily riches or popularity, but you will have that which you truly need.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones was once one of the most accomplished medical doctors in all of England, he was to be the successor of Thomas Horder, who was the primary physicial for the royal family but he reached a point where he was no longer content with being a medical doctor and became one of the most prominent preachers in the entire world.

In fact, when all is said and done, Lloyd-Jones may very well go down in history as one of the greatest preachers to have ever lived.

Lloyd-Jones said that one of the things that caused him the most pain was seeing these people come to him, people that were dying or sick, and they would come to him and get better and then leave to carry on living a sinful life.

Lloyd-Jones said that he was saving people’s lives just so they could go out and do worse things than they were doing before.

So, he left his ever-growing medical career and understand that when he left, it was such big news that it made it to the first page of the London Times.